DDR5 RAM is on the brink of 2020 GPU-style price inflation, and AI is to blame

There are already a lot of reasons to hate the AI boom. Take your pick, is it the detrimental and possibly irreversible impacts it's having on the environment? Is it the massive increase in data farming that's happening to train all of the AI models? If it's neither of those, I'm about to give gaming PC enthusiasts a whole new reason to hate AI.

It's taken years for DDR5 RAM to come down in price to the point where gamers feel it's actually worth upgrading to. Yes, new DDR5 RAM means a new motherboard and CPU if you're still stuck on DDR4, but it was finally getting to the point where you could easily find 16GB or 32GB of some of the best RAM for gaming for under $100 / £100.

If you were finally hoping to make the swap to DDR5 this year, I'm so sorry to tell you this, but you'll likely kick yourself for not doing it earlier. Even with Black Friday gaming PC deals beginning to trickle in, RAM, both DDR5 and DDR4, is more expensive than it's been in years.

Even our go-to affordable picks are seeing massively inflated costs right now. Crucial Pro DDR5, which you could easily find 32GB of for around $80-$100 a few months ago, is now sitting at $144.99 at Amazon.

T-Force's Delta RGB DDR5, which is easily the best budget RAM for most PC builders, is unrecognisable. Again, it's been relatively easy to buy 32GB of this memory for ~$100, but it's currently priced at $150 at Amazon.

Looking all the way up and down the price spectrum from the smaller brands to the biggest, RAM is seeing inflated price tags right now, but why am I blaming AI for that, you might ask? Well, allow Chen Libai, the chairman of Adata, to clue you in. He was recently quoted saying, "Our competitors in the fight for supply are no longer our peers, but giant CSPs (cloud service providers)".

There's been an enormous increase in AI hardware being produced in recent years, which is more RAM-dependent. RAM works as a speedway for data to be processed by CPUs and NPUs, and since AI uses a lot of data to swiftly produce answers and content, RAM is more vital to these machines.

Not only that, but AI data centers are extremely hungry for this RAM as AI models train themselves using vast amounts of data. According to our friends at Tom's Hardware, this could spark a "price apocalypse that could last a decade". Training for these models is done through masses of data, which is dependent on memory and storage - with even hundreds of gigabytes of DRAM being used at a time for one training cluster, according to reports.

It doesn't help that, if anything, RAM has been under-produced in the last few years due to a low demand from PC gamers who have been reluctant to upgrade to the latest standard. So when the AI surge began, the manufacturers of DRAM tech were already on the back foot in terms of supply and manufacturing speed. Now, OpenAI has recently signed onto an agreement with Samsung and SK Hynix for up to 900,000 DRAM wafers per month, which, according to Tom's Hardware, is roughly 40% of the global DRAM output of previous years.

Seasoned PC gamers might be thinking back to the 2020 days of mining cryptocurrencies, and how that caused a global GPU shortage, which even modern graphics cards are still impacted by in terms of prices.

In short, AI is already causing massive surges in DDR4 and DDR5 RAM costs, which is seriously going to hurt consumers as we head into the busiest shopping period of the year. I'll be keeping an eye out for as many low prices as I can, but if you're set on building a new PC at the moment, you may have no choice but to stomach inflated costs, or look at buying second-hand if you can.

• Crucial Pro DDR5: $144.99 at Amazon
• T-Force Delta RGB DDR5: $150 at Amazon
• Klevv Cras XR5 DDR5 RAM: $199 at Amazon

You might want to spend money on another part of your PC. Check out the best computer speakers, the best CPU for gaming, and the best Alienware gaming PCs.